am new to el capitan and have noticed that i cannot italicise any words in mac mail using lucida grande.
i can make bold and underline words but it refuses to italicize anything.
are italics no longer supported in mac mail?
thanks for any help or tips!
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)
Lucida Grande does not have an italic font, at least not the version installed on El Capitan.
Email is a text-only protocol. Anything not text must be encoded. To send font information, the message must be encoded with font info so that the receiving email client can determine what font info to use to display the message.
So, you can't tell it to create italicized text if the font information to create it does not exist.
In a word processor, you could tell the system to italicize anything and it will render some slanted text, and that program can send the slanted bits to a printer. However, Mail can't do the same thing via email.
This was the most helpful advice. Note in the Barney-15E example above that the "Typeface" for Helvetica Neue includes three italic choices, the Light italic is highlighted. I guess it will work for others who are at least using El Capitan, because the italics held when sent myself an email message.
On El Capitan 10.11.6, the italic button in the Mail Compose toolbar is disabled for Lucida Grande, because that font has no italic face installed. Type, and select the text that you want italicized, and then right-click on it. From the secondary menu, you can choose italic from the Font menu entry, for a faux italic effect.
Type, and select the text that you want italicized, and then right-click on it. From the secondary menu, you can choose italic from the Font menu entry, for a faux italic effect.
aha! that's good to know. thanks.
As Barney said, you just need to use a font that does have an italic family.
thanks for the reply. that's interesting because lucida used to have italics on my old imac/macmail, i'm sure of it...
i don't seem to have SF UI on my imac.
i'm guessing that's "system font" - which does show up in my preferences under fonts&colours, for "message list font".
however it does not show up under "message font":
None of those will affect the email you send. They are only for display at your end. You must set the message to Rich Text Format from the Format menu.
Then, Show Fonts from the Format menu and pick a font which has an Italic or Oblique font:
Abstractman23 wrote:
i don't seem to have SF UI on my imac.
Most people don't. FWIW, you should have marked Barney's reply as "Solved". Not mine.
why can't i use italics?
